Dear reader,

I want to apologize, because we literary scholars have failed you. We’ve done so by praising and encouraging certain kinds of reading at the expense of others. In particular, in our writings, we’ve devalued one of the most popular kinds of reading—enjoying a story’s thrilling twists and turns, surprises and reveals—in short: reading for the plot.

By reading for the plot, I mean reading for what happens. I don’t know you, but I bet you recognize and value the experience of being captivated by a story whose outcome you don’t know, or comforted by revisiting a story you already know. The story might take the form of a novel, TV show, movie, podcast, history book, or even gossip with friends. For a first-time reader of a thriller, for example, what happens may be an intense, burning question: “What’s about to happen?” For someone rereading a favorite novel, knowing in advance exactly what will happen can be a source of pleasure. Watching an adaptation of a story you’ve already experienced in another medium, you may be curious about what plot points will be included, cut, or even changed. Listening to a friend tell you about a recent health scare, you’ll probably experience their account of what happened and what might happen next as matters of real anxiety. There are many reasons people care about what has happened, is happening, or will happen in a story.

But when you studied literature in school or university, I expect that you were taught, implicitly or explicitly, that this plot-focused way of reading was simplistic, and that you were trained to read in new ways where plot was largely irrelevant. The message is: Only amateurs read for the plot.

But perhaps things are changing. I see glimmers of what the discipline might become in two new scholarly books, which hint at a future for literary scholarship if it learns to properly value the common experience of reading for the plot. Of course, you, reader, don’t need literary scholars’ help or endorsement to read for the plot. I’m not so presumptuous as to think you need us at all.

Rather, we need you. And we especially need the ways you read in your everyday life, as a reality check on the claims we make about how literature exists in the world.

Lost in Whale Song

Would you trust a scholar who admitted to only having speed-read the texts on which they claimed expertise? Of course not. That’s why scholars of all disciplines are expected to read slowly. Indeed, slow reading is taken to be one of the crucial conditions of knowledge for academic work. Reading slowly is associated with intellectual virtues like attentiveness, deliberation, open-mindedness, withholding of judgment. Whether a scholar is reading their primary objects of study (a historian examining archival documents, an anthropologist revisiting their own field notes) or scholarship written by their peers and predecessors, slowness enables a deep understanding.

For scholars of literature in particular, reading slowly reveals fascinating and unexpected aspects of literary works, which would likely be missed when reading even at an ordinary pace. We literary scholars discover things about works of literature by lingering with the language longer than is strictly necessary.

Like other literary scholars, I value such discoveries. Yet, in scholars’ eagerness to defend the value of slow reading, less has been said about what we might miss by reading this way. One thing we miss is plot. At this ultraslow pace, the plot doesn’t thicken, but rather thins.

Take a sequence from a movie and slow it down to a crawl. Let’s actually do it: Click this YouTube link, skip to 5:40, mute the audio, and slow the playback speed to 0.25. See how every action becomes ponderously, meditatively slow.

In the time it takes Maya Rudolph to run into the street, with Kristen Wiig in pursuit, we have time to reflect on class, women’s friendship, and the wedding-industrial complex. As each actress’s microexpressions spread out from milliseconds to minutes, we may interpret entire volumes of emotional complexity in the darting of an eye or the furrowing of a brow. Any shot, slowed down, might offer the contemplative pleasures of a Bill Viola artwork. All in all, our slow, hyperattentive viewing allows us to amass plenty of evidence for abstract, thematic, philosophical interpretations about the sequence.

But such “slow reading” of the movie has unintended consequences. The more we slow down, the harder it becomes to remember that Bridesmaids is a raucous comedy, and that what’s actually happening in the scene is a woman—in a wedding dress, in the middle of a busy street—emptying her bowels.

Another analogy, this time with music. Some years ago, a Justin Bieber song slowed down 800 percent went viral. In this remix, a chirpy teen pop track is totally transformed, merely by slowness, into ambient mystical whale song. Listen for yourself. It’s still recognizable as music, but the words are elongated to the point of incomprehension, familiar instruments decomposed into strange sounds. Like listening to real whale song, we have no idea what it’s about, but a vague sense that it must be profound and spiritual.

It’s not. “U Smile” is simply a song about how

Whenever you smile

I smile

Cute, right? Not exactly deep. Even laying it out on the page as though it’s poetry is a bit ridiculous. With movies and music, then, slowing down can end up producing a new object of deceptive profundity.

While movies and music have standard speeds at which they’re played, books have no fixed reading speed. Readers are in control of their own pace. This has concealed just how profoundly scholars transform literary works by reading as slowly as we do. Just as movie scenes and songs become new, mysterious objects in their own right when drastically slowed down, so too do texts. Yes, we can analyze a comedic pratfall at an extremely slow pace. But, in so doing, we risk missing the forest for the trees.

What do we miss when pop music becomes whale song and when a woman running for the bathroom becomes a meditation on capitalism? What do we miss when we treat every passage from a novel as a lyric poem? My answer: plot.

Scholars of literature and other narrative media (movies, TV shows, video games, opera, social media) have had little interest in reading for the plot. In Bridesmaids, a woman runs for the nearest bathroom, but the food poisoning catches up with her. In “U Smile,” Bieber explains that his addressee’s smile makes him smile. It may not be a lot, but this is what happens. Yet when we move from these miniature examples to full narratives, reading for what happens can be extremely compelling.

Literary scholars, however, tend to value and pay attention to other things like writing style, character psychology, connections to genres or other texts. If pushed, scholars might concede that acknowledging what happens is an important baseline for studying a novel or play, but that the really interesting thing is not what happens but how the story is told. Furthermore, many poems don’t have plots, so plot can’t be a requirement of literary analysis in general. And anyway, a plot summary is something anyone can get from Wikipedia or CliffsNotes, so scholars must do something very different if we want to produce knowledge that’s new.

In our slow, patient analysis of other aspects of literature, scholars have lost the plot. How might we get back to it, and why might we want to? Two new scholarly books—John Guillory’s On Close Reading and Yoon Sun Lee’s The Natural Laws of Plot—offer partial answers to those questions, centered on the “reading” and “plot” parts respectively.

Enemies to Allies

As John Guillory notes in On Close Reading, the term “slow reading” was, for decades, an alternative name for the practices now widely referred to by literary scholars as “close reading.” While close reading is not simply regular reading slowed down, it is certainly a slow way to read.

The phrase “close reading,” despite the familiarity of the component words, is a piece of discipline-specific jargon. Guillory helpfully clarifies that close reading is just one specific scholarly subtype of a broader range of practices he labels “reading closely,” encompassing “all instances of careful or methodical reading, whatever the aim or context of that reading.” Consider, for example, the varied ways that lawyers, actors, or the New Yorker’s legendarily exacting fact-checkers read texts closely.

Guillory’s aim in this slim but densely packed book is to offer a theory of what close reading is and a history of how it came to be. Literary scholars will find much to debate in Guillory’s theory and history, as well as in Scott Newstok’s remarkable annotated bibliography and accompanying online resource tracing the forgotten history of “close reading” as a term and as a practice.

Here I want to focus on a theme that runs through the book—the judgment of literary value—and how it relates to the scholarly neglect of reading for the plot. The link between close reading and value judgments has got buried over time—even most literary scholars aren’t aware of it nowadays.

As Guillory shows, close reading was a reaction against the literary critics of the 19th century, who had largely relied on their own authority to justify their judgments of the worth or worthlessness of a given book. In the early 20th century, scholars in the newly formed university departments of English Literature turned to close reading to explain why literature was or wasn’t valuable.

The core procedure of close reading, according to Guillory, is “showing the work of reading.” Rather than simply asserting the conclusions they’ve reached, close readers work step-by-step through their experiences that led them to their value judgment. In practice, this shift showed up in scholars’ writings as a far greater use of quotation than their critic predecessors. Close readers weave quotations from their object of study into their prose, thus spelling out in detail their reading of the words on the page. You may recall being told to “show your work” in school mathematics exercises, where reaching the correct answer is invalid without writing out the steps in reasoning that got you there. Close reading has a similar purpose, pushing scholars to be explicit about the evidence for their judgments.

When scholars advocate for close reading as the best way to demonstrate the value of a work of literature, they connect with a conception of literary value that extends far beyond academia: that the most valuable works of literature have enduring value. These are the books you return to across a lifetime, and that reward your repeated returns. Indeed, you may believe these books have enduring value not only in your own life but through the ages. Shakespeare is a “classic” because he’s stood the test of time. Toni Morrison is a “modern classic” because her writing promises to speak to generations to come. Close reading is a kind of test, at the microscale of the passage, as to which writings inexhaustibly reward our individual and collective rereading. Scholars’ close readings of a selective but growing canon of literary works constitute a body of evidence, proving that these works—rescued from a sea of second-rate, mediocre, and actively bad writing—will endure.

As close reading rose in status in the course of the 20th century—and here I’m going beyond what Guillory covers—I want to suggest that reading for the plot became associated with lesser-valued literary experiences: ephemeral, disposable, short lived, a one-time trick. A suspenseful plot might temporarily hold readers under its spell, compelled to read on by the question of what happens next. But once you know the ending the experience can’t be repeated. Thus, the reasoning goes, the power of plot is not enduring. What’s valuable about reading Shakespeare or Morrison is their characters, their style, their philosophy, their cosmology, not their plots. Rereading indicates enduring value (and close reading is a subspecies of rereading) whereas the value of reading for the plot can only be fleeting.

Yet something is now shifting, and Guillory’s book gives a clue as to why. A century ago, close reading emerged as a new way to identify and celebrate the superior value of great literature at a time when vast quantities of mass-market literature (which was often plot-driven “genre” fiction) as well as new narrative media like movies and radio serials were competing for audiences’ leisure time. Today, however, the most threatening antagonist to “great” literature isn’t reading for the plot, but, rather, the “skimming or browsing practices of reading” fostered by the internet, smartphones, and social media. Push notifications and snippets of text and video hijack our attention briefly but constantly. In this context, reading for the plot, which once was judged disposable and mindless, starts to seem, by virtue of its extended duration and power to grip us, like an admirable act of sustained attention.

Perhaps enduring rereadability is being replaced as our culture’s criterion of literary value with, simply, “sustained attention.” You may have noticed people, or even yourself, lamenting that they “no longer read.” But as Christina Lupton pointed out to me in a podcast conversation, when we feel that we’re “no longer reading,” what we’re usually missing is not reading in general (encompassing things like emails, websites, social media), but, specifically, the sustained linear reading associated with printed books, and in particular the immersive power of the novel.

Scholars of literature have often struggled to connect with fans of literature. Both value the same thing—literature—so why the lack of mutual understanding?

“Immersive reading” is a term Guillory uses intermittently throughout the book as a foil to close reading. Immersive reading is “the extracurricular reading of fiction, in which the reader is driven constantly forward, without pausing for closer inspection of the text.” Close reading, by implication, resists the “forward drive” and does pause for “closer inspection.” Yet by the end of the book, when evoking our age of digitally distracted reading, Guillory suggests literary scholars “might even want to concede the greater social value of immersive reading” (emphasis mine) compared to close reading, if only because far more people read for the plot than close-read. So while the two practices remain distinct, they now find themselves on the same side of a new battle.

In the age of the attention economy, as our culture is reorganizing its ideas about reading, scholarly close reading and everyday reading for the plot have gone from enemies to allies. Now, both can be valued, since both resist exploitative digital distraction. Perhaps, if scholars follow Guillory’s lead—and think about close reading as “one technique of reading among others, … a node in a larger, unorganized network of attentional techniques”—we can learn to incorporate a broader range of reading experiences into our scholarship. And, in the meantime, be less dismissive of reading for the plot.

Yet I have my doubts about how far scholars can go, for reasons that extend beyond the discipline of literature. Academic success—across the humanities, social sciences, and even natural sciences—depends on differentiating yourself from your peers, colleagues, and predecessors. I’m painfully aware that I won’t get an academic job, over the hundreds of other applicants, if I’m simply doing what others can easily do too. Close reading in particular serves to distinguish one literary scholar from another, since each scholar selects a somewhat different set of passages and interprets those passages differently from their predecessors. (Guillory’s previous book, Professing Criticism, was sharp on the contortions that literary scholars undergo as they pursue a university career.)

Reading for the plot, meanwhile, does not generate unique “readings.” On the contrary, readers tend to have broad consensus on the question of what happens in a story (experimental and avant-garde narratives aside). That’s only a problem for scholars. Outside academia, sharing an experience that doesn’t differentiate you from others can be a source of delight. In an episode of Will & Grace, Will and Karen discover they’re reading the same novel and excitedly begin to discuss the plot:

Will: Hey, so where are you in the book?

Karen: Oh! Diane just found out about Mark’s affair.

Will: Wait till you find out who it’s with.

Karen: Oh, honey, I know who it’s with!

Will: You think you do. But you don’t!

Karen: It’s not …?

Will: Uh-uh.

Karen: Is it …?

Will: Maybe.

Karen: Oh, you little book tease!

Will and Karen’s inscrutable exchanges about what happens in the book enrage their friend Jack, who hasn’t read it, and whose affronted squeals and huffs generate comedy throughout the episode. But for Karen and Will, there’s a palpable joy in discussing their shared experience of the same plot. There’s no interpretation, certainly no close reading, just excited conversation about their experiences of plot.

Still, being good at talking about plot with other first-time readers—being a good book tease—may help you make friends, but won’t get you an academic job. 

Tilting at Windmills

What happens in a novel? Beneath this question, Yoon Sun Lee uncovers a dense network of philosophical and scientific thinking in her remarkable The Natural Laws of Plot. The “natural laws” of the title refer to the theories of “natural philosophers” in the 18th and early 19th centuries, who worked to identify regular relations of cause and effect across fields such as physics, botany, and medicine. For these investigators of the natural world, what happened in an individual instance or across a series of repeated experiments was determined by, and allowed humans to probe, the laws of nature.

Likewise, the novelists of this period, as Lee demonstrates, began to explain events in their plot as being both enabled and constrained by natural laws. These include the physics that holds open a heavy window using counterweights (weights which, when removed, lead in Tristram Shandy to the protagonist’s unwanted circumcision—ouch!) and the regular motion of tides (which allow Robinson Crusoe, at the right time of day, to retrieve life-saving cargo from his sunken ship—yay!). As these incidents from novels show, natural laws shape what can happen in a plot (and how, and when, and where …). Far from being an inert backdrop to events, the natural world of these novels is inextricable from the plot. Lee argues that this intertwining of plot and natural laws gave novels an unprecedented feeling of realism.

As with Guillory, I won’t linger on the overarching history or theory. Instead, I’ll focus on a theme I find most enriching for the topic of reading for the plot: quixotism. In short, quixotism describes characters, like the protagonist of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, who drastically misunderstand the world they’re in. The phrase “tilting at windmills” has become an idiom of the English language, and refers to an episode in which Quixote mistakes a group of windmills for giants, charges at them with his lance, and is sent flying. From the perspective Lee offers us, Quixote’s knightly delusions come crashing into the natural laws of wind power and angular momentum, and the laws win.

Quixotism involves a character’s subjective misunderstanding of an objective reality, and the plot involves subjectivity eventually ceding to objectivity. “Quixotism ties the shape of the plot,” Lee explains, “to the distorted beliefs and perceptions of its protagonist.”

Up through the 18th century, novels typically treated quixotism with dramatic irony: Readers were informed beforehand what was objectively happening. In the windmills episode, sidekick Sancho Panza tells Quixote (and thus readers) that the “giants” are windmills before Quixote attacks them. Thanks to dramatic irony, then, the quixote is surprised to discover what’s really happening, but readers aren’t. In these early quixotic narratives, there was little “surprise” for readers in the question of what will happen or what will come to light. Later in the eighteenth century, though, quixotism becomes an unexpected source of suspense in its own right. And suspense starts to be understood as something that can counteract a tendency to remain trapped within the self. Classic quixotes are those who cannot feel suspense because they are confident that they already know how everything will turn out. Plots can now draw quixotes out of themselves, and draw us out of ourselves by hinting at secrets but not fully unveiling them until the end (emphases mine).

The “us” at the end here is evidently not scholarly readers, but, specifically, first-time readers reading for the plot. At the turn of the 19th century, novelists introduced a technique where the centuries-long tradition of surprising quixotic characters also became a way to spring surprises on readers. We may think we “already know how everything will turn out,” but the plot will eventually prove us wrong.

I’m currently writing a book on the history of the plot twist, and Lee’s account points to metaphysical depths (what is objectively real? how can I know it?) in the dizzying experience of discovering together with a protagonist that, all along, what you thought was happening in the plot was very different from what was really happening. I’ll withhold spoilers but you might think of 19th-century novels like Jane Austen’s Emma, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, or Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. Closer to the present, you might think of movies like The Sixth Sense and Parasite, TV shows like The Good Place and Black Mirror, or video games like Final Fantasy VII and Pentiment. Unlike a deus ex machina—a surprise that comes out of the blue—the big reveal of a twist narrative is all the more astonishing because clues have been present in the plot all along, we just didn’t realize it. The revelation pushes readers—sometimes delightfully, sometimes disturbingly—to rethink on the fly our own assumptions about what’s been happening. Sometimes we may even return to earlier scenes and reinterpret them from a newfound perspective of dramatic irony. In short, these examples show that, far from being mindless obsession, reading for the plot can involve intense thinking and attention to the text.

We are inheritors of the 19th century in appreciating the power of plot to astonish. The practice of spoiler alerts shows how much people value surprise and seek to protect surprises for each other. Scholarly readings of a narrative, however, always come from the opposite perspective of dramatic irony. Regardless of how the text sequences what readers know and when they know it, scholars’ close readings presuppose a full retrospective knowledge of what happens across the entire text. It would be absurd for a scholar to express surprise at what happens in the passage they’re close reading. A recent SNL sketch, “The Couple You Can’t Believe Are Together,” holds a mirror up to this absurdity in having brash fitness instructor Grant react with misplaced enthusiasm to the poetry of his dowdy girlfriend Alyssa.

Alyssa: The celadon waves lap against the lighthouse, softly, as if they’re dreaming of another life …

Grant: Boom! Slam it on that lighthouse, baby! Bang! Then what, baby, then what? Tell ’em what happens after that!

Alyssa: The old man watches the hourglass …

Grant, recoiling in shock: Oh damn! Oh damn! Where did that old man come from?

Mistakenly treating this lyric poem as a narrative, Grant is thrilled by each new line as though it’s a stunt in an action movie. Grant comes across as foolish, but literary scholars (despite our performance of seriousness) may be equally foolish in applying poetic modes of reading—close reading—to works of literature where plot is central. Plot’s power to astonish, while misapplied in Grant’s case, is a power literary scholars have neglected due to our one-sided investment in reading with dramatic irony.

Lee’s theory of quixotic plots gives new reasons to value surprise. For characters, the surprise of discovering they’ve been wrong reveals an objective reality. Whether the revelation is humiliating, joyful, or terrifying, it’s valuable: The character now understands something fundamental about the way the world works (defying gravity is not an option in realist fiction). More generally, Lee also gives scholars new reasons to value reading for the plot. The connections she makes between, on the one hand, reading for the plot and, on the other hand, philosophically dense questions about the distorting nature of subjectivity and the objective nature of the world are a boon for scholars wanting to make the case that plot is a worthy object of study.

Beyond the scholarly community, I also take Lee’s theory of quixotism to imply something about reading in general, namely that a first-time reader’s partial and perhaps error-prone understanding isn’t a bug but a feature. Readers are supposed to initially misunderstand what’s happening in a twist narrative, for example. A twist can fall flat if we see it coming. Scholars don’t like to get things wrong, sure, but when it comes to reading for the plot, readers’ expectations about what will happen give the first reading value.

What Happens Next?

I began by evoking what we’re able to perceive, as well as what we miss, when experiencing art at a radically slowed pace. Guillory’s book helps explain the conception of literary value—enduring rereadability—that motivates this scholarly practice, and the consequent neglect (and perhaps newly emerging appreciation) of reading for the plot. Lee’s book, in particular her account of quixotism, gives scholars new reasons to take plot—and the ordinary experiences of reading for the plot—more seriously. Together, they point toward a more expansive approach to reading, which would not only enrich our discipline intellectually, but also build deeper connections between our work and readers outside the discipline.

Scholars of literature have often struggled to connect with fans of literature. Both value the same thing—literature—so why the lack of mutual understanding? A major obstacle as I see it is that scholars and fans value very different kinds of reading. To secure professional status for ourselves and our discipline, scholars have amplified this difference still further. But as I wrote at the start, despite our air of superiority, we need you.

I’m not worried for the future of reading for the plot. The popularity of TV shows, movies, video games, podcasts, and novels, as well as plot-driven genres like romance, fantasy, and true crime, attests to an enduring appetite for stories. The world doesn’t need any help from us scholars in reading for the plot.

Perhaps, though, we might eventually enrich your reading experiences by uncovering forgotten histories (for instance, in times and places beyond the focus on 18th- and 19th-century Britain in Lee’s book) and developing new concepts (expanding on the passing mentions of “immersive” reading in Guillory’s book, for example) to better understand the value and appeal of reading for the plot. For my part, this has been the motivation of my podcast How To Read. But such a shift in the discipline would first require a humility we’re trained not to feel: the humility to consider that we might have something to learn from you about reading, and not the other way round. Will we prove ourselves worthy of your attention? The story is far from over.